The Goodness of St. Rocque, and Other Stories

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was writing at the intersection of Creole New Orleans and the emerging Harlem Renaissance, and this collection captures both worlds in luminous detail. The stories unfold in a city of bayous and Bourbon Street, of fish fries on the Mississippi Sound and quiet corners where lovers meet in secret. At the collection's heart is "The Goodness of St. Rocque," in which the beautiful Manuela seeks help from the Wizened One to win back her faithless lover, Theophile, through traditional charms and prayers. But these are not mere romantic exercises. Dunbar-Nelson writes with airy, easy eloquence about women who scheme and yearn, musicians who lose their passion, and aspiring opera singers who fall for fishermen with hidden depths. The prose moves with the rhythm of the city itself, capturing a specific people and place while speaking to universal human longings. Here is a vanishing world rendered with tenderness and sharp observation, from a writer who refused to be invisible.